by Bill Bryson
As I stood in this state of indecision, there was a dry crack of wood and a careless disturbance of undergrowth perhaps fifty feet into the woods — something good-sized and unseen. I stopped everything — moving, breathing, thinking — and stood on tiptoe peering into the leafy void. The noise came again, nearer. Whatever it was, it was coming my way! Whimpering quietly but sincerely, I ran a hundred yards, day pack bouncing, glasses jiggling, then turned, heart stopped, and looked back. A deer, a large buck, handsome and proud, stepped onto the path, gazed at me for a moment without concern, and sauntered on. I took a long moment to catch my breath, wiped a river of sweat from my brow, and felt profoundly discouraged.
Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and didn’t know how. I hadn’t lost just Katz, my boon companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum, my feeling of purpose. In the most literal way I needed to find my feet again. And now on top of everything else I was quaking as if I had never been out in the woods before. All the experience I had piled up in the earlier weeks seemed to make it harder rather than easier to be out on the trail on my own. I hadn’t expected this. It didn’t seem fair. It certainly wasn’t right. In a glum frame of mind, I returned to the car.
I spent the night near Harrisburg and in the morning drove north and east across the state on back highways, trying to follow the trail as closely as I could by road, stopping from time to time where possible to sample the trail but without finding anything remotely rewarding, so mostly I drove.
Little by little the town names along the way began to take on a frank industrial tone — Port Carbon, Minersville, Slatedale — and I realized I was entering the strange, half-forgotten world of Pennsylvania’s anthracite region. At Minersville, I turned onto a back highway and headed through a landscape of overgrown mine tailings and rusting machinery towards Centralia, the strangest, saddest town I believe I have ever seen.
Eastern Pennsylvania sits on one of the richest coal beds on earth. Almost from the moment Europeans arrived, they realized there was coal out there in quantities almost beyond conception. The trouble was, it was virtually all anthracite, a coal so immensely hard (it is 95 percent carbon) that for a very long time no one could figure out how to get it to light. It wasn’t until 1828 that an enterprising Scot named James Neilson had the simple but effective idea of injecting heated air rather than cold air into an iron furnace by means of a bellows. The process became known as a hot blast, and it transformed the coal industry all over the world (Wales, too, had a lot of anthracite) but especially in the United States. By the end of the century America was producing 300 million tons of coal a year, about as much as the rest of the world put together, and the great bulk of it came from Pennsylvania’s anthracite belt.
Meanwhile, to its intense gratification, Pennsylvania had also discovered oil — not only discovered it but devised ways to make it industrially useful. Petroleum (or rock oil) had been a curiosity of western Pennsylvania for years. It emerged in seeps along riverbanks, where it was blotted up with blankets to be made into patent medicines esteemed for their value to cure everything from scrofula to diarrhea. In 1859, a mysterious figure named Col. Edwin Drake (who wasn’t a colonel at all but a retired railway conductor, with no understanding of geology) developed, from goodness knows where, the belief that oil could be extracted from the ground via wells. At Titusville, he bored a hole to a depth of sixty-nine feet and got the world’s first gusher. Quickly it was realized that petroleum in volume not only could be used to bind bowels and banish scabby growths but could be refined into lucrative products like paraffin and kerosene. Western Pennsylvania boomed inordinately. In three months, as John McPhee notes in In Suspect Terrain, the endearingly named Pithole City went from a population of zero to 15,000, and other towns throughout the region sprang up — Oil City, Petroleum Center, Red Hot. John Wilkes Booth came and lost his savings, then went off to kill a president, but others stayed and made a fortune.
For one lively half century Pennsylvania had a virtual monopoly on one of the most valuable products in the world, oil, and an overwhelmingly dominant role in the production of a second, coal. Because of the proximity of rich supplies of fuel, the state became the center of big, fuel-intensive industries like steelmaking and chemicals. Lots of people became colossally rich.
But not the mineworkers. Mining has of course always been a wretched line of work everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thanks to immigration, miners were infinitely expendable. When the Welsh got belligerent, you brought in Irish. When they failed to satisfy, you brought in Italians or Poles or Hungarians. Workers were paid by the ton, which both encouraged them to hack out coal with reckless haste and meant that any labor they expended making their environment safer or more comfortable went uncompensated. Mine shafts were bored through the earth like holes through Swiss cheese, often destabilizing whole valleys. In 1846 at Carbondale almost fifty acres of mine shafts collapsed simultaneously without warning, claiming hundreds of lives. Explosions and flash fires were common. Between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, 50,000 people died in American mines.
The great irony of anthracite is that, tough as it is to light, once you get it lit it’s nearly impossible to put out. Stories of uncontrolled mine fires are legion in eastern Pennsylvania. One fire at Lehigh started in 1850 and didn’t burn itself out until the Great Depression — eighty years after it started.
And thus we come to Centralia. For a century, Centralia was a sturdy little pit community. However difficult life may have been for the early miners, by the second half of the twentieth century Centralia was a reasonably prosperous, snug, hardworking town with a population approaching 2,000. It had a thriving business district, with banks and a post office and the normal range of shops and small department stores, a high school, four churches, an Odd Fellows Club, a town hall — in short, a typical, pleasant, contentedly anonymous small American town.
Unfortunately, it also sat on twenty-four million tons of anthracite. In 1962, a fire in a dump on the edge of town ignited a coal seam. The fire department poured thousands of gallons of water on the fire, but each time they seemed to have it extinguished it came back, like those trick birthday candles that go out for a moment and then spontaneously reignite. And then, very slowly, the fire began to eat its way along the subterranean seams. Smoke began to rise eerily from the ground over a wide area, like steam off a lake at dawn. On Highway 61, the pavement grew warm to the touch, then began to crack and settle, rendering the road unusable. The smoking zone passed under the highway and fanned out through a neighboring woodland and up towards St. Ignatius Catholic church on a knoll above the town.
The U.S. Bureau of Mines brought in experts, who proposed any number of possible remedies — digging a deep trench through the town, deflecting the course of the fire with explosives, flushing the whole thing out hydraulically — but the cheapest proposal would have cost at least $20 million, with no guarantee that it would work, and in any case no one was empowered to spend that kind of money. So the fire slowly burned on.
In 1979, the owner of a gas station near the center of town found that the temperature in his underground tanks was registering 172°F. Sensors sunk into the earth showed that the temperature thirteen feet under the tanks was almost 1,000°. Elsewhere, people were discovering that their cellar walls and floors were hot to the touch. By now smoke was seeping from the ground all over town, and people were beginning to grow nauseated and faint from the increased levels of carbon dioxide in their homes. In 1981, a twelve-year-old boy was playing in his grandmother’s backyard when a plume of smoke appeared in front of him. As he stared at it, the ground suddenly opened around him. He clung to tree roots until someone heard his calls and hauled him out. The hole was found to be eighty feet deep. With
in days, similar cave-ins were appearing all over town. It was about then that people started getting serious about the fire.
The federal government came up with $42 million to evacuate the town. As people moved out, their houses were bulldozed and the rubble was neatly, fastidiously cleared away until there were almost no buildings remaining. So today Centralia isn’t really even a ghost town. It’s just a big open space with a grid of empty streets still surreally furnished with stop signs and fire hydrants. Every thirty feet or so there is a neat, paved driveway going fifteen or twenty yards to nowhere. There are still a few houses scattered around — all of them modest, narrow, wood-framed structures stabilized with brick buttresses — and a couple of buildings in what was once the central business district.
I parked outside a building with a faded sign that said, rather grandly, “CENTRALIA MINE FIRE PROJECT OFFICE OF THE COLUMBIA REDEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY.” The building was boarded and all but falling down. Next door was another, in better shape, called Speed Stop Car Parts, overlooking a neatly groomed park with an American flag on a pole. The shop appeared to be still in business but the interior was darkened and there was no one around. There was no one anywhere, come to that — no passing traffic, not a sound but the lazy clank of a metal ring knocking against the flagpole. Here and there in the vacant lots were metal cylinders, like oil drums, that had been fixed in the ground and were silently venting smoke.
Up a slight slope, across an expanse of vacant lots, a modern church, quite large, stood in a lazy pall of white smoke — St. Ignatius, I assumed. I walked up. The church looked sound and usable — the windows were not boarded and there were no KEEP OUT signs — but it was locked, and there was no board announcing services or anything even to indicate its name or denomination. All around it, smoke was hovering wispily off the ground, and just behind it, great volumes of smoke were billowing from the earth over a large area. I walked over and found myself on the lip of a vast cauldron, perhaps an acre in extent, which was emitting thick, cloudlike, pure white smoke — the kind of smoke you get from burning tires or old blankets. It was impossible to tell through the stew of smoke how deep the hole was. The ground felt warm and was loosely covered in a fine ash.
I walked back to the front of the church. A heavy metal crash barrier stood across the old road and a new highway curved off down a hillside away from the town. I stepped around the barrier and walked down old Highway 61. Clumps of weedy grass poked through the surface here and there, but it still looked like a serviceable road. All around on both sides for a considerable distance the land smoked broodingly, like the aftermath of a forest fire. About fifty yards along, a jagged crack appeared down the center of the highway and quickly grew into a severe gash several inches across, emitting still more smoke. In places, the road on one side of the gash had subsided a foot or more, or slumped into a shallow, bowl-shaped depression. From time to time I peered into the crack but couldn’t gauge anything of its depth for the swirling smoke, which proved to be disagreeably acrid and sulphurous when the breeze pushed it over me.
I walked along for some minutes, gravely examining the scar as if I were some kind of official inspector of highways, before I spread my gaze more generally and it dawned on me that I was in the middle — very much in the middle — of an extensively smoking landscape, on possibly no more than a skin of asphalt, above a fire that had been burning out of control for thirty-four years — not, I’m bound to say, the smartest place in North America to position oneself. Perhaps it was no more than a literally heated imagination, but the ground suddenly seemed distinctly spongy and resilient, as if I were walking across a mattress. I retreated in haste to the car.
It seemed odd on reflection that I, or any other severely foolish person, could drive in and have a look around a place as patently dangerous and unstable as Centralia, and yet there was nothing to stop anyone from venturing anywhere. What was odder still was that the evacuation of Centralia was not total. Those who wanted to stay and live with the possibility of having their houses fall into the earth were allowed to remain, and a few had evidently so chosen. I got back in the car and drove up to a lone house in the center of town. The house, painted a pale green, was eerily neat and well maintained. A vase of artificial flowers and other modest decorative knickknacks stood on a windowsill, and there was a bed of marigolds by the freshly painted stoop. But there was no car in the drive, and no one answered the bell.
Several of the other houses proved on closer inspection to be unoccupied. Two were boarded and had “DANGER — KEEP OUT” notices tacked to them. Five or six others, including a clutch of three on the far side of the central park, were still evidently lived in — one, amazingly, even had children’s toys in the yard (who on earth would keep children in a place like this?) — but there was no answer at any of the bells I tried. Everyone was either at work or, for all I knew, lying dead on the kitchen floor. At one house I knocked at I thought I saw a curtain move, but I couldn’t be sure. Who knows how crazy these people might be after three decades of living on top of an inferno and breathing head-lightening quantities of CO2, or how weary they might have grown of outsiders cheerfully poking around and treating their town as a curious diversion? I was privately relieved that no one answered my knocks because I couldn’t for the life of me think what my opening question would be.
It was well past lunchtime, so I drove the five miles or so to Mt. Carmel, the nearest town. Mt. Carmel was mildly startling after Centralia — a busy little town, nicely old-fashioned, with traffic on Main Street
and sidewalks full of shoppers and other townsfolk going about their business. I had lunch at the Academy Luncheonette and Sporting Goods Store (possibly the only place in America where you can gaze at jockstraps while eating a tuna salad sandwich) and was intending then to push on in search of the AT, but on the way back to the car I passed a public library and impulsively popped in to ask if they had any information on Centralia.
They did — three fat files bulging with newspaper and magazine clippings, most dating from 1979-1981, when Centralia briefly attracted national attention, particularly after the little boy, one Todd Dombowski, was nearly swallowed by the earth in his granny’s backyard.
There was also, poignantly now, a slender, hardbound history of Centralia, prepared to mark the town’s centenary just before the outbreak of the fire. It was full of photographs showing a bustling town not at all unlike the one that stood just outside the library door, but with the difference of thirty-some years. I had forgotten just how distant the 1960s have grown. All the men in the photographs wore hats; the women and girls were in billowy skirts. All, of course, were happily unaware that their pleasant, anonymous town was quite doomed. It was nearly impossible to connect the busy place in the photographs to the empty space from which I had just come.
As I put the things back in their folders, a clipping fluttered to the floor. It was an article from Newsweek. Someone had underlined a short paragraph towards the end of the article and put three exclamation marks in the margin. It was a quote from a mine fire authority observing that if the rate of burning held steady, there was enough coal under Centralia to burn for a thousand years.
It happened that a few miles beyond Centralia there was another scene of arresting devastation that I had heard about and was keen to investigate — a mountainside in the Lehigh Valley that had been so lavishly polluted by a zinc mill that it had been entirely stripped of vegetation. I had heard about it from John Connolly, who recalled it as being near Palmerton, so I drove there the following morning. Palmerton was a good-sized town, grimy and industrial but not without its finer points — a couple of solid turn-of-the-century civic buildings that gave it an air of consequence, a dignified central square, and a business district that was clearly depressed but gamely clinging to life. The background was dominated everywhere by big, prisonlike factories, all of which appeared to be shut. At one end of town, I spotted what I had come to find — a steep, broad eminence, perhaps 1,500 feet h
igh and several miles long, which was almost entirely naked of vegetation. There was a parking lot beside the road and a factory a hundred yards or so beyond. I pulled into the lot and got out to gawk — it truly was a sight.
As I stood there, some fat guy in a uniform stepped out of a security booth and waddled towards me looking cross and officious.
“The hell you think you’re doing?” he barked.
“Pardon me?” I replied, taken aback, and then: “I’m looking at that hill.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I can’t look at a hill?”
“Not here you can’t. This is private property.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Well, it’s private — like the sign says.” He indicated a post that was in fact signless and looked momentarily struck. “Well, it’s private,” he added.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” I said again, not appreciating yet how keenly this man took his responsibilities. I was still marveling at the hill. “That’s an amazing sight, isn’t it?” I said.
“What is?”
“That mountain. There isn’t a scrap of vegetation on it.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m not paid to look at hillsides.”
“Well, you should look sometime. I think you’d be surprised. So is that the zinc factory then?” I said, with a nod at the complex of buildings over his left shoulder.
He regarded me suspiciously. “What do you want to know for?”
I returned his stare. “I’m out of zinc,” I replied.